Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

By Ben Fountain

In a sweeping work of reportage set over the course of 2016, New York Times bestselling author Ben Fountain recounts a surreal year of politics and an exploration of the third American existential crisis

Twice before in its history, the United States has been faced with a crisis so severe it was forced to reinvent itself in order to survive: first, the struggle over slavery, culminating in the Civil War, and the second, the Great Depression, which led to President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the establishment of America as a social-democratic state. In a sequence of essays that excavate the past while laying bare the political upheaval of 2016, Ben Fountain argues that the United States may be facing a third existential crisis, one that will require a “burning” of the old order as America attempts to remake itself.

Beautiful Country Burn Again narrates a shocking year in American politics, moving from the early days of the Iowa Caucus to the crystalizing moments of the Democratic and Republican national conventions, and culminating in the aftershocks of the weeks following election night. Along the way, Fountain probes deeply into history, illuminating the forces and watershed moments of the past that mirror and precipitated the present, from the hollowed-out notion of the American Dream, to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, to our weaponized new conception of American exceptionalism, to the cult of celebrity that gave rise to Donald Trump.

In an urgent and deeply incisive voice, Ben Fountain has fused history and the present day to paint a startling portrait of the state of our nation.  Beautiful Country Burn Again is a searing indictment of how we came to this point, and where we may be headed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780062688767

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.

Book preview

Dedication

For John Issac Fountain

and Lee Caitlin Fountain

and, as ever,

for Sharie

Epigraph

. . . Beautiful country burn again, Point Pinos down to the Sur Rivers

Burn as before with bitter wonders, land and ocean and the Carmel water.

ROBINSON JEFFERS, APOLOGY FOR BAD DREAMS

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue: The Third Reinvention

Book of Days: January

Iowa 2016: Riding the Roadkill Express

Book of Days: February

The Phony in American Politics

Book of Days: March

American Crossroads: Reagan, Trump, and the Devil Down South

Book of Days: April

American Exceptionalism and the Great Game: At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Book of Days: May

Doing the Chickenhawk with Trump: Talking Fast and Loose in the Time of Endless War

Book of Days: June

Cheerleaders of the Star-Spangled Apocalypse: Fear and Loathing with the NRA in Louisville, Kentucky

Book of Days: July

Cleveland Fear Factory

Book of Days: August

Hillary Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Book of Days: September

Two American Dreams

Book of Days: October

The Long Good Deal

Book of Days: November

Trump Rising: King Donald Saddles Up with the Wrecking Crew

Book of Days: December

A Familiar Spirit

Acknowledgments

Credits

Index

About the Author

Also by Ben Fountain

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The Third Reinvention

2016 was the year all the crazy parts of America ran amok over the rest. Screens, memes, fake news, Twitter storms, Russian hackers, pussy grabbers, Hillary’s emails, war, the wall, the wolf call of the alt-right, hand size, lies upon lies upon lies and moneymoneymoney—the more money, the more lies, is this politics’ iron rule?—they all combined for a billion-dollar stink of an election. This wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation, a creature comprised of degenerate political logic. The logic of this politics—the logic of the Frankenstein—requires ultimately that the monster turn on its maker. The logic doesn’t tell us who wins. That has to play out in the slog of daily gains and losses, but it would be hard to devise a more spectacular conflict than this high-functioning creature of American schizophrenia versus the very system that brought him to power.

To call Donald Trump a hypocrite insults the scale of the thing. Move far enough along the hypocritic spectrum and eventually you cross into schizophrenia, and nothing less than psychopathy serves to illustrate the magnitude of Trump’s achievement. In him we had a candidate who proffered family values at every turn, a man twice divorced, a tabloid-fodder serial adulterer and sexual trash-talker. The least racist person you’ll ever meet, he described himself, while animating his campaign with racist appeals so large and livid that neo-Nazis, the KKK, and the alt-right endorsed him in language evocative of second comings. After making his career as one of the most celebrated libertines of our time, he became a Bible quoter and toter on the campaign trail, this self-proclaimed business genius with a complicated history of bankruptcies, bailouts, welched debts, and dealings with mobsters. A draft dodger enamored of the military; macho tough-talker and finicky germophobe; champion of U.S. manufacturing, purveyor of signature-label clothing made overseas; and loud, proud patriot with a mysterious affinity for Vladimir Putin, one of America’s most dedicated foes. Trump the billionaire ran as a fire-breathing populist while offering nothing concrete or even coherent in terms of wages, unions, health care, or taxes that might benefit working people, though his tax plan promised huge benefits for the upper class.

None of this was hidden. The Trump disjunct flamed in plain sight for everyone to see, and he owned it with the coarse, loose-cannon style of the consummate New York asshole. All the stranger, then, that this star and symbol of big-city life should become the hero of the heartland, all those millions of wholesome acres of Bible Belts that truss the nation’s middle and nether regions. The guy from Sodom and Gomorrah was all right! His insults and earthiness were received as authenticity: here at last was a man who would stick it to the elites after all these years of eating their shit, the sniffy pieties about tolerance and diversity forced down your throat by the pinheads who’d figured it out for the rest of us. It was galling. It got you down on yourself. It made you touchy and weak where you used to be strong, then this badass comes along and puts it right out there every time he flaps his mouth, says all the things you wanted to say all these years as you lived in constant apology just for being who you are, diminished, depressed, bottled up, pissed off, a hundred fuck-yous a day muttered at Obama and his crowd, heavy weather from Washington all the days of the year. A miracle, the white man who says what he wants! Free, free at last!

This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self. To be acknowledged as you are, affirmed and blessed from above: one can imagine it as a spiritual experience. A profound burden is lifted. No more doubt, no dark loathings, only the certainty that you are good and on God’s side. Ecstasy isn’t out of the question. What greater thrill besides sex to be delivered to yourself, liberated from the bad opinion of your enemies? Something of that ecstasy could be heard at Trump’s rallies, Build that wall! and Lock her up! bellowed like Romans watching lions sink their teeth into Christian flesh.

He tells it like it is. How often we heard him praised in those terms. He says what a lot of people are thinking. Apparently so; many more than were willing to admit to the pollsters, though one wonders how strong white identity was to begin with, when the basic courtesy that’s the face of political correctness is viewed as a monstrous threat. If economic distress is offered as the socially acceptable reason for Trump’s election, the fact remains that many millions of his supporters voted against what seems to be their own economic interests. White women voted for him in spite of Hillary’s support of equal pay, along with a broad complementary agenda that promised help with the exhausting challenge—most of which falls on women—of juggling home life and job. Working- and middle-class whites voted for him despite his conventional enrich-the-rich policies (rants against trade deals aside) that have, among the poor and working class especially, stunted wages, shortened life expectancy, driven up drug addiction and suicide rates, and made upward mobility the exception rather than the rule. Trump’s election seemed to be the triumph of identity politics—white identity politics—over economic interest.

Then again, maybe identity politics is economic. Maybe nothing less than hard-core economic realism explains Trump’s victory, a well-honed popular instinct for how money and race have always worked in America. It must be said that many millions of Americans implicitly, and not unreasonably, regard freedom as a finite thing: to the extent that any group, tribe, cohort has greater freedom, others must necessarily have less. Then there’s the corollary, which gets us closer to the crux: the less freedom you have, the more readily you’re subject to economic plunder. Put the two propositions together and you have what could be called the American anthropology, the two horns of a bloody dilemma on which the democratic experiment has balanced for 240 years. Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation. In practical terms, the organizing principle has most often turned on race and gender, the bondage of black men and women being the starkest example. It’s as plain as the numbers in the account books of a Cooper River rice plantation, race-based chattel slavery as the engine for tremendous wealth creation. Emancipation erased some $4 billion of capital from Southern slaveholders’ books. It also literally diminished these slaveholders’ freedom with respect to their former slaves; or, to shade it more finely, restricted their prerogative, their license, the field over which their free will could play. Forced labor, assault, theft, rape, torture, mutilation, murder, kidnapping, these were all within the accepted prerogative of slave owners, all mechanisms of control in a social structure organized for plunder on the industrial scale. The power—the prerogative—of literal life and death; a monopoly on freedom, if you will. American slaveholders enjoyed a scope of freedom that we associate these days with drug lords and Third World lunatic dictators.

The plunder continued in slightly less brutal form after Emancipation, but there was an even bigger game afoot, a more universal plunder with race still playing a pivotal role. Jay Gould, the nineteenth-century robber baron, offered a clue when he said, I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. A startlingly frank approach to the politics of division,¹ but Gould overstated the case. He didn’t have to hire anybody; thanks to America’s racist legacy, it’s easy to get the job done for free. Generations of political hacks have done quite well for themselves and their clients by salting the racial divide, the basic message going something like: Watch out, white people! Blacks are coming for your homes, your women, your jobs, your life! The move is so standard a part of the hack repertoire that it’s come down to us as a political term of art, the Southern Strategy,² and for the past fifty years it’s worked to perfection³ in distracting the white working and middle classes from the huge plunder of wealth by society’s higher reaches.

But with the Great Recession of 2008, that snake oil started to lose some snap. The biggest wipeout of household wealth in eighty years got people’s attention: we’d been had, was the general feeling, a sentiment that the government was all too willing to confirm. The financial institutions that caused the crisis received billions in government loans and guarantees, dwarfing funds devoted to things that would help working people—unemployment benefits, mortgage relief, fiscal stimulus. The bankers continued to get huge bonuses; the big financial institutions got bigger; and for all the fraud and speculative flimflam that led to the crash, and despite numerous referrals to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution, only one midlevel investment banker went to jail. What the Tea Party and Occupy movements had in common was the rage of the little guy getting screwed right and left, though how we were getting it, and by whom, these essential questions were ripe for manipulation amid an angry, badly educated, highly propagandized public. Trump rode the rage by coupling easy-to-digest populist rhetoric—the system is rigged!—with bare-knuckle racism, the most reliable play in the American power-grab book. But after all the sound and fury of the most bizarre election in the country’s history, the equation hasn’t changed. Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation. Until the values in the equation change, it’s still a chump’s game.

TWICE IN ITS HISTORY THE UNITED STATES HAS HAD TO REINVENT itself in order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy. In each case, the reinvention was compelled by the profoundest sort of crisis, and each case may be framed as a turning point in the long elaboration of certain words the country has looked to time and again to define itself. The words were there at the start, presented as self-evident truths in the Declaration of Independence. [A]ll men are created equal. All men are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these rights—bestowed by no less an authority than the creator, thus sacred—are the rights to life, liberty & the pursuit of happiness.⁴

The Enlightenment philosopher, political genius, and slave owner Thomas Jefferson wrote these words; fair to say that he, too, had the American schizophrenia. But the moral potential was in the words, and a reasonable person could place the center of American history right there, in the contest for fulfillment of that potential. At no point has it ever been a sure thing, or even the common goal. Emancipation, the first reinvention, was brought about by the crisis of slavery. Were people of color to be included among the men . . . created equal. Were they to have dominion over their lives, their bodies, the profits of their labor. For four years the land literally burned with the question; either the country would be reinvented as a profoundly different social order—with a redistribution of freedom, in effect, a resetting of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation—or it would be broken in two. Some seventy years later the existential crisis of the Great Depression forced a second reinvention, and if existential reads as an overstatement, that’s because we’ve lost proper appreciation for the turmoil of the early 1930s.⁵ Had the country elected as president in 1932 some tragic mediocrity along the lines of a Franklin Pierce or a James Buchanan, it’s easy to imagine an antebellum or even Weimar-like drift toward civil war, a totalitarian regime. Another literal burning. Instead we got Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, his answer to the threat that unbridled industrial capitalism posed for democracy. Roosevelt articulated as no president had ever done before the link between freedom and profit, subjugation and plunder. Modern life, he asserted, threatened to trap working people in a new kind of bondage, a shell democracy that maintained the forms of political equality while abetting an economic system that denied the great mass of people meaningful agency over their lives. The early 1930s offered plenty of proof for Roosevelt’s proposition: the soup kitchens, migrant camps, hobo squats, and railroad yards, not to mention the National Mall in Washington, DC, during the months it was occupied by the Bonus Marchers, were teeming with slat-ribbed citizens who, it may be safely said, had lost meaningful agency over their lives. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention, Roosevelt made his case for a second term and the continuation of the New Deal:

The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks, and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service . . .

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody’s business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.

The New Deal reinvented America for a second time—call it the second redistribution of freedom, a radical reset of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation. A reset as applied to whites, it must be noted. Powerful Southern legislators saw to it that blacks were largely excluded from the benefits of New Deal initiatives. All men created equal. Still not even close. The pursuit of happiness. So many forced to run that race on their knees. It would take the civil rights movement to jump-start that unfinished work, but the New Deal reinvention established a structure, a rough framework for equality that wouldn’t be seriously challenged until the Reagan era.

There’s a touch of the uncanny in all this. Roughly eighty years separate the Revolutionary period from Emancipation. A more or less equal span of time separates Emancipation from the New Deal—about the span of a reasonably long human life, and nearly the same run of years from the New Deal to the present. The long clock, coincidentally or not—historian mystics, dig it!—concurs with the palpable ripeness of our time, an era of insane economics where the top One Percent possesses wealth on the level of sultans and pre-Revolution French kings, while the middle and bottom struggle to manage such basic necessities as health care and educating their kids. This kind of imbalance screams that the freedom-profits-plunder equation is seriously skewed, and is just as seriously incompatible with a system of government that claims to be democratic. Overweening freedom for a few—or call it what you will, autonomy, license, prerogative, privilege—translates, as it always has, into plunder of the many, a state of affairs starkly opposed to Jefferson’s foundational principle of equality, and the guarantee of meaningful autonomy—those rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—that by the same moral logic proceeds from equality.

Economic tyranny, Franklin Roosevelt called it, the modern capitalist threat to equality of rights that he sought to counter with the New Deal, just as the abolitionist movement—and Abraham Lincoln, in due course—sought to end that earlier form of legalized, race-based economic tyranny. There was reaction, of course. The bloodiest war in the country’s history was fought over racial tyranny, a bloodletting that continues to this day. The reaction to Roosevelt’s reinvention was confined to the political fringes for almost fifty years; it took Reagan to bring it into the mainstream, the Reagan Revolution some call it, the unbridling of market forces that carried distinct racial overtones, the conservative hostility toward government displaying special animus for government’s ongoing efforts to realize the promise of Emancipation.

The gross disparities not just of wealth but of opportunity—disparities that are even more pronounced for people of color—very arguably show that at this point in our history, the reaction is winning. Maybe it’s a sign that we’ve lost all sense of the trauma that led to the first two reinventions. We don’t remember, not in the visceral, experiential sense. The living memory of once-recent history has faded to abstraction; maybe this is the meaning of those eighty-year cycles of crisis and reinvention, that we have to live it all over again. And maybe nothing short of an existential crisis can trigger these profound acts of reinvention. Lincoln and Roosevelt had the vision and strength of will to lead the country out of two incarnations of hell. One wonders how close to hell we’ll have to come in our own time before a similarly drastic act of reinvention is attempted. Either it succeeds, as has happened twice in our history, or America becomes a democracy in name only, a sham sustained by the props and gestures of representative democracy, as fake as the soundstage of the cheesiest Hollywood movie.

MUCH OF THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN OVER THE COURSE OF THE 2016 presidential campaign. These essays attempt to bear witness to the events of an extraordinary election season, and to place those events in context, to decipher some meaning beyond the pileup of polls and speeches and news cycles. The scorched-earth tactics of the campaign, the wholesale retreat into fantasy, the daily outbreaks of absurd and disturbed behaviors, it seemed the only proper way to view these was as symptoms of tremendous stress. A fundamental break seemed to be building, a feeling that became more urgent with Trump’s run to the nomination and election. Whatever the trajectory of the forces and stresses in play, it seemed certain he would deepen and accelerate their trajectory.

So this book may be read as the record of a developing crisis, one drastic enough to raise the possibility of a third reinvention, which, if attempted, will inevitably meet with vigorous, perhaps violent, resistance from stakeholders in the current order. In facing the crises of their own times, Lincoln and Roosevelt urged the country to a larger sense of itself, a broadening of Jefferson’s principle of equality and what it means for humans to be truly free. The reinventions led by those two presidents can and should be viewed as moral actions, but they were supremely practical as well: the survival of the country as a genuine constitutional democracy was at stake. The beautiful country was burning: literally in the first instance, thankfully less so in the second. One wonders what manner of burning awaits us in the time of Trump.

Book of Days

January

Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia undergraduate, is arrested by North Korean officials at Pyongyang International Airport for an alleged hostile act against the state. A Texas law takes effect allowing licensed gun owners to carry firearms, concealed or openly, into psychiatric hospitals. President Obama expands background checks for some forms of gun purchase, and requires anyone who makes a living by selling guns to register as a licensed gun dealer and conduct background checks. Pretty soon you won’t be able to get guns, Donald Trump says of the new rules, while a spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association comments, This is it, really? They’re not really doing anything. Immigration agents stage weekend raids that round up 121 people in Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, and Sean Penn’s interview with fugitive Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán, a.k.a. El Chapo, is published in Rolling Stone. I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and marijuana than anybody else in the world, Guzmán, whose fortune is estimated at $1 billion, tells Penn. The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo marks the first anniversary of the terrorist attack on its office with a special edition whose cover features a caricature of a bloody God wielding an assault rifle. Obama delivers his final State of the Union address, saying, The future we want is within our reach. The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon by armed militants continues; the group’s leader, Ammon Bundy, who has said that his opposition to the federal government is divinely ordained, calls for the federal government to give up its unconstitutional presence in this county. Iran captures two U.S. Navy patrol boats and ten American sailors in the Persian Gulf for alleged snooping. Republican Party leaders express fears of a hostile takeover by so-called lunch-bucket conservatives, and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina says the party is in a demographic death spiral. Oil falls to $30.44 a barrel, its lowest level in twelve years, and the Powerball jackpot hits $1.5 billion, a sum that would fail to put the winner on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest individuals. David Bowie dies at age sixty-nine. A suicide-bomb attack near the Blue Mosque in Istanbul’s historic district kills ten tourists; ISIS claims responsibility. The Michigan National Guard is deployed to Flint to distribute bottled water, and rap artist Michael Render, better known as Killer Mike, endorses Bernie Sanders. I will gladly accept the mantle of anger, Trump says at a GOP debate in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Josh Holmes, former chief of staff for Mitch McConnell, tells Politico, There are at least two candidates who could utterly destroy the Republican bench for a generation if they became the nominee. The ten U.S. sailors captured by Iran are released, along with their boats. Planned Parenthood sues the makers of stealth videos that purport to show the organization selling fetal tissue to researchers for profit; subsequent investigations by federal and state lawmakers revealed no wrongdoing by Planned Parenthood, and Republicans in Congress continue their efforts to cut off federal funding to the organization. U.S. and European nations lift sanctions on Iran after international inspectors conclude that Iran has followed through on its obligation to dismantle large parts of its nuclear program. Concurrent with the lifting of sanctions, Iran releases five American prisoners and the U.S. releases seven Iranians. The New York Times reports that death rates for whites in the U.S. are either rising or flattening for all adult age groups under sixty-five, and death rates for young whites are even higher, especially for those less educated, that is, without a high school degree; drug overdoses are identified as the main driver behind the rise in mortality. Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO series Girls, campaigns in Iowa on behalf of Hillary Clinton, and Ted Cruz is revealed to have financed his 2012 Senate campaign with approximately $1 million in loans from Goldman Sachs and Citibank, which he failed to disclose in his filings with the Federal Election Commission. Two endangered whooping cranes are shot dead in Southeast Texas, and more than twenty whooping cranes have been shot and killed in the U.S. in the past five years, out of a worldwide population of approximately six hundred. Obama signs a federal emergency declaration for Flint, and Trump declares that if he is elected president, American sailors will never be on their knees to a foreign country. Calls grow for a boycott of the Oscar ceremonies to protest the second straight year of all-white actor nominees; Chris Rock, host for this year’s ceremony, unveils a new promotion for the broadcast, calling it the White BET Awards. ISIS confirms the death of notorious executioner Jihadi John, Ted Cruz compares himself to Ronald Reagan, and some of the classified emails on Hillary Clinton’s home computer server are found to be even more sensitive than top secret. I’ll fix Flint, Michigan governor Rick Snyder promises, after requesting federal aid to meet an estimated $41 million in emergency costs. Sarah Palin endorses Trump at a rally in Ames, Iowa. Media heads are spinning, Palin says as a smiling Trump looks on. No more pussyfooting around . . . He’s going rogue left and right. That’s why he’s doing so well. Ted Cruz questions whether Trump is stable and calm enough to lead the nation’s military. El Chapo is captured in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and Taiwan elects its first woman president. The UN reports that from January 2014 to October 2015, nearly nineteen thousand Iraqi civilians were killed, nearly double that number wounded, and three million fled their homes due to fighting among ISIS, Iraqi security forces, and pro-government militias. Eighteen die as a historic blizzard hits the eastern United States, and Glenn Beck endorses Ted Cruz for president. I have prayed for the next George Washington, and I believe I have found him, Beck declares, after which he and Cruz take turns administering the presidential oath of office to one another. Abe Vigoda dies. Ammon Bundy and his fellow occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are arrested, and one—LaVoy Finicum, who once swore that he would die rather than go to jail—is shot dead by authorities after resisting arrest. U.S. military commanders discuss the necessity for a decades-long American commitment in Afghanistan, and the Doomsday Clock remains at three minutes till midnight, with geopolitical tensions and the lack of aggressive steps to combat climate change counteracting the positives of the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord. Trump, citing a wise-guy press release by Fox, says he will skip the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses after Fox refuses to drop Megyn Kelly from the panel of moderators. Senate Democrats propose $400 million in federal aid to help Michigan replace Flint’s lead-contaminated pipes, about half of the estimated cost, and Senate Republicans refuse to commit without offsetting budget cuts. Braden Joplin, a Texas Tech University student and campaign volunteer for Ben Carson, is killed in a car accident on icy roads in Iowa, and Carson suspends his campaign to meet with Joplin’s family. The World Health Organization says that Zika is spreading explosively in the Americas. Barbie dolls will soon be sold in three body types—curvy, tall, and petite—and will also come in seven different skin tones and twenty-two different eye colors. American film star Leonardo DiCaprio has a private audience with the Pope. Residents of Sebring, Ohio, learn that high levels of lead were found in their tap water during the previous summer, and the mayor is jeered at a council meeting when he tells the mother of a child who has elevated lead levels that it is too early to put all the blame on the town’s water. Trump holds a Special Event to Benefit Veterans Organizations in Des Moines while the Fox-sponsored Republican debate takes place across town. A grand jury in Houston indicts two antiabortion activists for their roles in making the Planned Parenthood stealth videos. The Huffington Post announces that its coverage of Donald Trump will move from the entertainment section to news, and that each Trump story will come with an addendum stating, Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther, and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims—1.6 billion members of an entire religion—from entering the U.S. Thirty-seven people—most believed to be Syrian refugees—drown when their boat capsizes while crossing from Turkey to Greece; at least ten children and babies are among the dead. More than two hundred fifty refugees have drowned during January while attempting to reach Greece.

Iowa 2016

Riding the Roadkill Express

1. She Was Not Blah.

Is Hillary freaking? Has to be with all those ’08 flashbacks frying the brainpan, that previous coronation spoiled by a grandiloquent rookie who nobody gave a chance, then he rolled her up like a Mafia hit in a cheap rug. Now it’s a hectoring old geezer with scribby gray hair and suspiciously perfect teeth, the kind you slide in every morning and snap at the mirror, clack clack. Put a tan vest and a Bernie name tag on him and he could be one of those grizzled old guys down at the Home Depot, you ask him a perfectly reasonable question about sweat soldering, say, or flush valves, he just snorts and walks off. A career socialist no less. And Hillary wailed unto the Lord: Why me? Down fifty points in the polls a year ago, Sanders has clawed almost even just as the thing gets real.

Real as Iowa, the snows and throes of opening night, the first winnowing of contenders from the roadkill. Interstating it east from Des Moines with the sun at our back, the talk is mostly of him, not Bernie but the other one, the hair, the mouth, the Twitter king, the joke that stopped being funny sometime around Thanksgiving. About the same time one noticed a kind of morbid countdown happening in the press. With only two months before the Iowa caucuses . . . six weeks . . . a month . . . days . . . Implicit here was rationalist disbelief at Trump’s defiance of political physics, and the assumption, also implied, increasingly frayed, that he would crash long before actual votes were cast. In this his candidacy was supposed to be much like his hair, like a gas explosion or a mango soufflé, or any highly transient event involving lots of hot air and artificial volume. The pros, weren’t they supposed to have a grip by now? The same machine that produced a reliable string of establishment nominees, the two Bushes, Dole, McCain, Romney, and now another Bush on deck, the smart one, the one with the $100 million Super PAC. But something strange has happened. Is happening. In recent TV appearances, Reince Priebus, chair of the Republican National Committee, has had the thousand-yard stare of a mall cop whose Segway is in the shop.

But tonight is for Hillary, scheduled to rally in Davenport. The road runs ruler-straight for miles and miles. A bald eagle cruises the dome of severe-clear sky, flakes of cirrus dusting the bend of crystalline blue. Small towns and little commercial nodes heave up every few miles with their mix-n-match assortments of Subways, Exxons, Starbucks, Denny’s. Apparently porn is one of the few non-franchised service industries left in America; there’s the Lion’s Den Adult Superstore outside Altoona, one of several such sui generis enterprises we’ll see today. Barns are huge—full to bursting, one imagines, eyeing all this chocolatey earth—the houses big, solid, harbored in windbreaks of trees, everything fresh-painted and clean, and what’s rare for farm country, hardly any junked machinery about. To keep a farm in this kind of spit-polish shape takes heroic physical effort. Hard enough to manage the main labor of farming, the work that has to be done this week, today, right now; niceties like structural maintenance and cleanup tend to slide for all but the most disciplined farmers, but here everyone seems bound to the strictest standards of neatness and order. There’s something Puritan in it, an air of moral rigor, as if the tense self-discipline of early New England was moved two thousand miles and supersized for the huge proportions of the Midwest. One has a sense of blessings bestowed, of blessings vigorously earned. Of people who know they’ve landed in paradise and are determined not to blow it.

This is for a fact some of the most fertile soil on the planet. About a million years ago glaciers bulldozed the region, cutting off hilltops and dumping rich soil into the valleys. Eons of weather scooped and palmed the earth into low rolling hills, which today are a study in winter earth colors, brown and dun laced with patches of remnant snow, arctic blue where the ponds and creeks are iced over. The corduroy wales of plowed fields track the contour lines, such gentle curves as might be conjured in a meditation garden. It’s beautiful country, pretty much heartbreaking in the golden afternoon light, and, as reported by Richard Manning in Harper’s,¹ highly toxic. Massive concentrations of nitrates—from chemical fertilizers, and the shit of some twenty-one million Iowa hogs and fifty-two million Iowa chickens, most of them housed in animal factories—have rendered much of the state’s drinking water unfit for human consumption. This is the same nitrate pollution that poisoned the water supply of Toledo, Ohio, in 2014, prompting Governor Kasich to call out the National Guard, and the same nitrates that are responsible for the vast (size of Connecticut) dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Large realities worm their way into daily life in odd ways. One Iowa sportsman told Manning that hunters now have to carry drinking water for their dogs out in the field, to keep them from being poisoned by algae blooms in the tainted streams and creeks.²

Manning notes that people have been growing crops and raising hogs in Iowa ever since the Civil War, but it’s only in the last twenty years that the practices of industrial agriculture have made Iowa water dangerous to drink. This span of time coincides with the unprecedented rise of obesity and associated illnesses in America, which Manning attributes to the crops—corn and soybeans, mostly—favored by Big Ag. It is, in other words, a food production model that gets you coming and going, and with Manning’s report in mind the pleasure one gets from the beauties of the Iowa landscape is distinctly conflicted. And when you add the olfactory sense . . . the fact is, Iowa stinks. Literally, pervasively, far and wide and end to end. I grew up in the sticks and know from farm smells, but Iowa is of a different order altogether, its stench goes well beyond the localized funk of the barnyard, the ammoniac reek of summer shit in the stable and pen. Iowa is skunky like a pulp mill is skunky, like the sediment tanks of a big-city sewage treatment plant. It takes industrial-scale effort to create cosmic stinks like this.

People of Iowa, I apologize. No offense intended. The sun tips farther to the west, and the light softens, turns lavender as shadows crawl out from the ridges and hills. Near Iowa City there’s a barn painted entirely as an American flag. Lopsided Vs of geese cut low overhead, and soon the terrain flattens out and all the snow has disappeared. We pass the World’s Largest Truck Stop—Iowa 80 and roll into Davenport at dusk, which features a not overly active downtown of 1950s bank and department-store architecture, red-brick warehouses, a smatter of low-rise office buildings. One hears the rumbling of trains in Davenport. The Mississippi River is rumored to be nearby. Where we’re going the blocks turn scruffy, a dark run of empty storefronts and halfway houses that suddenly comes alive with people and cars, a pop-up traffic jam. Hillary! Hillary Appearing Tonight! An intersection near the Col presents a homiletic scene, it could be the stage set for a new American morality play—

The line for the Col stretches far down the block. A few bundled-up protestors are stationed across the street, presumably the authors of the hand-scrawled banner hung from the building at their back. Hillary Lied Americans Died. Inside the Col the vibe is up, happy, fizzy, lots of bright young things are scurrying about, activist-organizer types psyched for a big night. A band is thumping out country tunes, I’m lookin’ for a good time, the djreowww djreowww of the pedal steel soon giving way to the choo-choo chug of Folsom Prison Blues. The Col, a.k.a. the Col Ballroom, the Coliseum, Saengerfest Halle, is a circa-1914 building with a barrel-vaulted main space and a brick exterior the color of Dentyne chewing gum, a product of civic pride and aspiration from a time when culture was local, or not at all. German immigrants brought the music to Davenport, liberal exiles fleeing the failed revolution of 1848, the same kaput grab at democracy that sent Karl Marx packing to London. The old country speaks in the Col’s classical details, the arched proscenium and plaster reliefs, the stained-glass lyres wreathed in stylized vegetable matter. Modern touches include a disco ball over the dance floor, Christmas lights strung from the mezzanine’s wrought-iron railing. Framed posters witness an impressive history, everyone from Sinatra to Chuck Berry has played here, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, the Beach Boys, Buddy Holly. Jimi Hendrix played the Col a month before Woodstock. The annual Bix Lives! festival celebrates the hometown boy who made good. All these threads of musical tradition are a happy thing to see; they do as all true culture does, encourage one’s humanity.

Tonight’s band keeps banging out tunes as the place fills up, the older folks in jeans and sneakers and puffy coats, the kids tatted and pierced, lightly misted in androgyny. Two middle-aged women here from Texas to volunteer for Hillary make the case to a guy with a notepad who says he’s press. Time for a woman, they say. Hillary’s earned it, we’ve earned it. She’s pushed $18 million down ballot, Bernie zilch. The music stops and the crowd starts chanting I’m with her! I’m with her!, grinning, cheerfully raucous, nonchalantly diverse across the age-color-gender spectrum, though there’s a notable lack of young white men. By the time Bill Clinton steps onto the stage the crowd is primed, maybe twelve hundred souls close-packed under the disco ball and another fifty or sixty standing on risers upstage, optics fodder for the news cameras.

The former president comes trailing his own story line tonight. News reports of the past few days have it that Bill has lost his mojo. He’s seemed distracted, tired—old, in so many words, and maybe not all there? Tonight he’s neatly turned out in a dark green flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, brown slacks, and a brown herringbone jacket, a country-weekend look for the good people of Davenport. His wiry hair—pure silver now, trimmed lower and tamer than in the old days—still sports that same sharp center-right part, the razorback ridge of it glinting with every turn. The slim-Bill version we’ve come to know these latter years has at last revealed the man without his baby fat. The face is narrower, longer, the bone structure clearly demarked, the jaw drops firm and clean down to the slightly cleft chin, but there’s a fragility in his big face now, the blown-glass delicacy of elderly ladies and fine china. Bill got skinny to ease the strain on a problematic heart—now there’s a brick of a metaphor for you, one you could argue either way. He loved too much? Too little? Or maybe both at once, a bipolar beast of the heart.

We can hardly look at skinny Bill these days without flashing on our own mortality, but he brings the fire tonight. "I was in awe of her when I met

Reviews for Beautiful Country Burn Again

[texasbooklover · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

POLITICS/GOVERNMENTBen FountainBeautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and RevolutionEcco BooksHardcover, 978-0-0626-8884-2 (also available as an e-book, audiobook, and large-print paperback), 448 pgs., $27.99September 25, 2018“Nautonomy: the asymmetrical production and distribution of life chances which limit and erode the possibilities of political participation.” —David Held, Democracy and the Global OrderBen Fountain pulls no punches. “This wasn’t Democrats versus Republicans so much as the sad, psychotic, and vengeful in the national life producing a strange mutation,” he writes, “a creature comprised of degenerate political logic.”Where were you when you heard the news? You remember, don’t you, whether you thought the news was fantastic or catastrophic? I do; I was somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean on a 787 bound for New Delhi. So, naturally, at 9 p.m. EST I began pestering the cabin crew for election news. The pilot resorted to announcing updates and when it was done, when the result was announced, I cried.I write this review on the day Paul Manafort pleads guilty to conspiracy against the United States.Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution is the first book of nonfiction from Ben Fountain, a former attorney, whose fiction is famous. You may not be familiar with Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, a collection of short stories which won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2007, but you cannot have avoided Fountain’s novel, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and became a film directed by Ang Lee — Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.“I was having feelings. They weren’t good feelings,” Fountain writes. “By Thanksgiving, 2015, these feelings had crystalized into a sense that something new and ugly was afoot in the land of the famously free.” So, The Guardian newspaper dispatched him to the campaign trail to “figure out what the hell was going on out there.” The result was a series of essays for the newspaper which eventually became Beautiful Country Burn Again.Much more than a simple expansion of that series of essays, this book is a triumph of reporting — a synthesis of research, interviews, observation, experience, and analysis producing a vital mix of politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, psychology, and history. Fountain contextualizes the result with a “Book of Days,” preceding each chapter, which sets the global stage upon which the events of that chapter played themselves out.Fountain explores and explains and distills into what he calls the “American anthropology,” which is basically this: If we believe freedom is a finite thing, then the perception of a loss of freedom necessarily means that someone else has gained more freedom by taking it from us, and the less freedom you have, the more likely you are to be exploited economically. Ergo, “the American anthropology, the two horns of a bloody dilemma on which the democratic experiment has balanced for 240 years,” Fountain writes. “Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.” If the boot is on my neck now then it must have been removed from someone else’s neck.“Twice in its history the United States has had to reinvent itself,” Fountain writes, “in order to survive as a plausibly genuine constitutional democracy.” Those instances were the Civil War and the Great Depression. In the first instance, “the land literally burned … either the country would be reinvented as a profoundly different social order — with a redistribution of freedom … a resetting of the values in the freedom-profits-plunder equation — or it would be broken in two.”The Great Depression forced a second reckoning: FDR’s New Deal countered what Fountain describes as “the threat that unbridled industrial capitalism posed for democracy.” In other words, if you are owned by your employer, with no bargaining power and no safety net if you fall, you are a slave in “a new kind of bondage, a shell democracy that maintained the forms of political equality while abetting an economic system that denied the great mass of people meaningful agency over their lives.”Fountain believes we are now faced with the choice of a third reinvention or the death of the American Dream, in essence a crisis point of existential threat no less pivotal than the two previous reinventions.As Jon Meacham, historian and author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (and many other books), says, “Sometimes it takes a novelist to capture a world gone mad, and it’s difficult to imagine a better match for our times than Ben Fountain.” Agreed. Fountain has examined the symptoms, analyzed the data, and offered a diagnosis of what ails us: “Fear is the herpes of American politics: the symptoms bloom and fade, but the virus never dies.” (Thanks for that image.)If you’ve been paying attention, there is no new information in Beautiful Country Burn Again; if you haven’t been paying attention, then brace yourselves. Reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson without the ’ludes, Fountain writes in a colloquial style, telling unvarnished home-truths with an outraged, acerbic wit. He has a gift for getting at the essence of a thing, recognizing Trump as a combination of J.R. Ewing and Tony Soprano, his presidency a reality-TV program taken to its logical extreme.Fountain conducts a consciousness-raising session and a deep-dive of a history lesson in electoral politics. He demonstrates cause and effect in clear, concise, and persuasive prose—no magic here. No one escapes; Fountain takes the Republicans to task as well as Democrats, closing Beautiful Country Burn Again in urgent tones with an inspiring moral case for what could be. Don’t skip the footnotes; they include authorial commentary, sometimes in French, as well as the citations.The Fire Next Time, The Fire This Time, Beautiful Country Burn Again. Possibly the most chilling sentence in Fountain’s new book is, “This may be the most powerful medicine in politics, the leader who delivers a man to his natural self.” Is the result of the 2016 election a product of our natural selves? I do not want this to be who we are.As disturbing and enraging as Fountain’s subject is, it’s a pleasure to read long-form journalism by a gifted fiction writer. I hope he does it again.Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.